Three Cheap Ways to Know What Content Your Customers Want

• May 21, 2018

There are time-honored ways of determining customers needs, ranging from surveys to focus groups. And your organization probably has spent years using these and other methods to determine how to deliver want customers want through your products and services. But do you know what content they want?

That question has become critically important with the rise of content marketing. We often know what product features our customers care about, but we aren’t sure of which content subjects will draw them to our products. And the traditional surveys and focus groups won’t answer the question, because they are too expensive to use for this purpose.

Instead, we present three cheap ways to know what your customers are interested in, so you can provide that content to them:

1. Web and other content analytics. Start with the content you already have. Which pages are visited the most? Which lead to conversions? Which emails get opened? Which social shares are clicked? Start with understanding which content is already performing and identify those subjects as ones to tackle more.

2. Search keywords. What are your customers searching for? Yes, look at Google Trends or other keyword tools to find out big trends, but how about your own customers using your site search? Do you know even what those subjects are? You might be surprised that you aren’t covering some of the most important subjects.

3. Social conversations. What are people talking about? Better, what are they complaining about? Those problems are what content marketing can solve. How do you listen to social conversations?

These digital methods of listening to what your customers want are:

• Cheap
• Up-to-the-minute
• Unprompted

That last one is especially important because surveys and focus groups get answers only to the questions that are asked. Knowing what people are thinking about before you ask tells you what they will be searching for–which is how your content marketing attracts.